(1) Field of Invention
The present invention relates to video content retrieval and, more specifically, to a method and system for identifying an activity in a query video by generating descriptors for interest points in the videos, and searching for videos containing similar activities in a hierarchically arranged video database.
(2) Description of Related Art
Video archive search systems are known in the art. Previous approaches to video archive searching rely on some statistical information of the video images or global motion information in the video to classify videos into several pre-determined classes. These approaches can only provide broad categories of contents of the videos, and are not specific to the activity contents. Furthermore, the previous approaches require prior knowledge of the content categories of the archive videos before organizing the videos in the archives to be searched. Therefore, any change in such information can render the search system out-dated, and the entire archive must be re-processed.
Thus, a continuing need exists for an efficient and scalable indexing mechanism and system for searching large video archives based on video activity content.